Category Archives: Racism Watch

Features, General T&T, Race and Identity, Racism Watch

Conrad Friedrich Stollmeyer – Pt 2

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 14, 2018

PART 1 — PART 2

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeTrinidad has always been seen as an exciting, exotic place. In 1498 after Columbus made his fourth and final voyage to the New World, he averred: “Gold is generated in sterile lands and wherever the sun is strong” (Hughes, Energy without Conscience). Around 1580 Sir Walter Raleigh left England to search for the fabled city of gold. V. S. Naipaul examined Raleigh’s obsession in The Loss of El Dorado.
Continue reading Conrad Friedrich Stollmeyer – Pt 2 →

Features, General T&T, Race and Identity, Racism Watch

Conrad Friedrich Stollmeyer

3 Comments

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 07, 2018

PART 1 — PART 2

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeIt goes without saying that human beings are complex people; none more so than Conrad Stollmeyer who came to Trinidad in 1844 under strange circumstances. He arrived after apprenticeship ended (1838), at a time when the ex-slaves were desperately trying to find plots of land to house themselves and their families, to cultivate their crops and tend to their animals.
Continue reading Conrad Friedrich Stollmeyer →

Africa, Gender, General T&T, International, Racism Watch, South Africa

Flawed Heroines

4 Comments

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 09, 2018

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeQueen Njinga of Africa ruled Ndongo (located in present-day Angola) from 1624-1663. Despite her outstanding accomplishments, “Europeans at the time portrayed her as a bloodthirsty cannibal who thought nothing of murdering babies and slaughtering her enemies.” This is the conclusion that Linda Heywood, a Trinidadian professor of history at Boston University, arrives at in her new biography, Njinga of Angola: African Warrior Queen (2017).
Continue reading Flawed Heroines →

General T&T, PNM, Politics, Race and Identity, Racism Watch, UNC

Contradictions & Counterfactuals – Pt 3

5 Comments

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 20, 2018

“…a state could never have been born without surplus.” —Yanis Varoufakis

PART 1 — PART 2 — PART 3

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeReading Ralph Maraj and Kamal Persad’s contributions, one would think that Eric Williams and the PNM were the worst things that ever happened to Trinidad and Tobago (T&T). They seem to suggest that if only Badase Sagan Maraj and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) had won the 1956 general election T&T would have been a paradise.
Continue reading Contradictions & Counterfactuals – Pt 3 →

Africa, General T&T, Labour, Law, PNM, Politics, Race and Identity, Racism Watch, UNC

Contradictions & Counterfactuals – Pt 2

10 Comments

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 13, 2018

“…a state could never have been born without surplus.” —Yanis Varoufakis

PART 1 — PART 2

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeIn the nineteenth century Trinidad saw the first massive giveaway of lands and bonuses to the Indians in lieu of their passages to India. Those options were never available to Africans. This was the first step in the systematic dispossession of Africans in the land to which they had been brought. Few of us seem to remember it.

Fast-forward to one hundred and thirty years (around the year 2003) when a PNM government engineered another massive giveaway of lands, which is taking place in front of our eyes under the faulty premise that Indians had the first preference because they farmed the lands. This was/is strange logic since these lands belong to all nationals.
Continue reading Contradictions & Counterfactuals – Pt 2 →

General T&T, PNM, Politics, Racism Watch

Contradictions and Counterfactuals

22 Comments

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 08, 2018

“…a state could never have been born without surplus.” —Yanis Varoufakis

PART 1

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeV. I. Lenin, revolutionary and philosopher, believed that contradictions are inherent in everything we do. He argued: “Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradictions in the very essence of objects.”

Consider this: At the same time a PNM government (read black government) gives out 14,492 acres of land to ex-Caroni Ltd., workers (mostly Indo-Trinidadians) at a cost of $5 billion (Guardian, January 27), Kamal Persad claims that over the last 48 years PNM’s policies and programs “were directed towards the advancement of the black supporters of the PNM. [Eric] Williams’s intention was to create a local black professional middle and upper class to effectively replace the whites” (Express, January 24).
Continue reading Contradictions and Counterfactuals →

England, Gender, General T&T, International, Race and Identity, Racism Watch

The Black Princess

11 Comments

By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
December 05, 2017

Princess we are happy
You came our way
But unfortunately
You could not stay.

This is a welcome
That has no end
Please pay us a visit
Now and then.

— The Mighty Sparrow

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeIn 1955 Princess Margaret came to Trinidad to visit. Most of Her Majesty’s subjects felt elated. I attended Tacarigua AC School at the time. All of my fellow students lined the Churchill Roosevelt Highway with our flags (the Union Jack) to pay tribute to our princess. Two days later we headed down to the Queen’s Park Oval to give her a royal welcome.
Continue reading The Black Princess →

corruption, Education, General T&T, Politics, Racism Watch

Forged in the Bowels of Corruption: Pt 3

3 Comments

By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
November 26, 2017

PART 1 — PART 2 — PART 3 — PART 4 — PART 5

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeThe development of Trinidad and Tobago’s energy sector owes a lot to the dedication and ingenuity of Ken Julien, our energy czar. Wendell Mottley, T&T’s former Finance Minister, suggests that Julien would not have been successful if he had approached his job through “the typical state bureaucracy.” He was successful because Eric Williams, the former PM, “insulated the energy investments from the hassles and delays that might ordinarily be expected in a programme of such size, complexity and duration” (Trevor Boopsingh & Gregory McGuire, From Oil to Gas and Beyond).
Continue reading Forged in the Bowels of Corruption: Pt 3 →

corruption, Education, General T&T, Racism Watch

Forged in the Bowels of Corruption: Pt 2

2 Comments

By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
November 20, 2017

PART 1 — PART 2 — PART 3 — PART 4 — PART 5

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeThings get mighty strange in T&T. Before President Anthony Carmona could wash he foot, he jump into de dance with the chiasmus: “I don’t feel because there is a recession that we need to have a recession in education” (Express, November 11). It sounds noble but it does not amount to a hill of beans.

When there is a recession everything recedes including educational funding for the simple reason that the government or the stakeholder does not have enough money to pay for an expensive enterprise, particularly when monies extended to that enterprise may not have been used with the necessary circumspection. However, the President’s statement sounded Solomonic in the presence of enablers of a seriously disabled system. They included UTT chairman Prof. Ken Julien, deputy chairman Prof. Clement Imbert, UTT president Prof. Sarun Al-Zubadidy, Education Minister Anthony Garcia and Chief Justice Ivor Archie.
Continue reading Forged in the Bowels of Corruption: Pt 2 →

corruption, Education, General T&T, Racism Watch

Forged in the Bowels of Corruption: Pt 1

20 Comments

By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
November 14, 2017

PART 1 — PART 2 — PART 3 — PART 4 — PART 5

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeThe last time I heard, the University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT) was a public institution, which suggests the public owns it. This suggests further that the public (in this case, the taxpayers) have a right to know what’s taking place at “our national university” since the taxpayers have spent billions of dollars to establish this public institution.
Continue reading Forged in the Bowels of Corruption: Pt 1 →